Reddit"s management just can"t seem to get a break, it seems. After the scandal following the termination of Victoria Taylor - the moderator of its infamous AMA sessions - site-wide protests by moderators and the subsequent resignation of its chief executive, the company has just lost its foremost engineer. This follows the departure of its previous CEO, Yishan Wong, just a year ago, further compounding the company"s inability to retain top talent.
Bethayne Blount, who previously worked at Facebook and had been the VP of Engineering at Reddit for just two months, today announced that she was leaving the company. She elucidates her reasoning as follows:
I feel like there are going be some big bumps on the road ahead for Reddit. Along the way, there are some very aggressive implied promises being made to the community — in comments to mods, quotes from board members — and they’re going have some pretty big challenges in meeting those implied promises.
While newly appointed CEO Steve Huffman had announced, immediately following the departure of his predecessor, that he would focus on providing subreddit moderators with the tools they have been asking for all along and be more transparent, the departure of his chief engineer - and specifically her uncertainty regarding these promises - appears to undermines his words.
Though the company was one of the first to make strides toward pay equality, there have also been murmurs of gender discrimination at the company, given that a string of prominent female employees have either been fired or have left the company within the span of a month. While she does not attribute her departure as being "directly related to [her] gender," she does imply that Pao was placed on a "glass cliff", deliberately put in charge of the company during a crisis and then made liable for it.
Reddit co-founder and current CEO Steve Huffman, meanwhile, had this to say on the matter:
Bethanye’s departure had nothing to do with gender, and I was looking forward to working with her. The company is growing, and we have the opportunity to improve in many areas — including the number of women in leadership positions. I am confident in our ability to recruit women at the executive level, as we have made a point to do so at Hipmunk, where more than half of the executives are women.
George Pang will replace her as interim VP of Engineering, while Blount has expressed an interest in perhaps starting a new company.
Source: ReCode